“I know it’s not cherry, but I think she will still like it.” She stood near the front door, awkwardly waiting for me to hug her. Sometimes I did. Sometimes I didn’t. It depended on my mood. It was more of a half-hug night.
“Let me know when Austin gets here. I’d stay and wait, but I have work in the morning, and Kael needs to get home.”
My dad waved from his chair in the living room, not caring enough to say a proper goodbye.
Kael stood in the doorway, half in, half out.
“Do you have plans this weekend? We’re driving up to Atlanta on Saturday for a few days, if you want to—” Estelle offered. My dad looked at her pointedly. Kael looked down at his boots.
“I’ll be working.” I loved Atlanta, but no way was I going with them. And wouldn’t their plans be changing with Austin coming to town?
“That’s too bad.” She tucked her dark hair behind her ear. She had shiny, wide earrings on. “Maybe next time.”
“Maybe,” I said, descending the porch steps.
My dad and Kael were both dead silent.
“It was so nice to meet you, Martin. Drive safe.” Estelle smiled as I motioned for him to get off the porch. I wanted to leave, and fast. Once he caught up to me, I practically ran down the driveway and yanked my car door open.
“I told you those dinners are the worst.”
Even after suffering through it, Kael didn’t have a word to say.
“Do you have a family?” I assumed he wouldn’t answer, but anything was better than silence as we drove away, and I began to think about my brother and the trouble he continued to cause. I needed a distraction.
“Do I have a family?” he repeated, the words bouncing around in the small space of the car.
Muttering, I tried to correct myself. I was starting to feel nervous again. “I mean, obviously you have a family, otherwise you wouldn’t exist. But are they like that? Three courses, matching plates, all the beer, all that shit.”
“No,” he said, staring out the windshield of my car. “I don’t think many families are like that.”
“In a good way or a bad way?”
“Both.” He shrugged, buckling his seatbelt. “It depends if you’re looking at the intent, or the impact that intention has on other people.”
I slowed down to stop at the stop sign. I looked at him when the car was fully halted. “Huh?”
He turned, fixing his eyes on me. “Her intention is to impress you. To please you and your dad. The decorations, the folded napkins, the elaborate meal. She obviously cares not only what your dad thinks, but what you think.” He used his index finger to point at me.
“Continue,” I said, beginning to drive again. I was concentrating on our conversation and slowed down to below the speed limit.
“She wants to impress you, to make you see the effort she’s putting in.” He took a breath. “To you it’s all performative, and the impact it has on you is, well, it’s hell to even be there. So what I’m saying is that intention and impact aren’t connecting in the right way. But each of you thinks what you are doing and feeling is right.”
“Did you read that in a self-help book?” I scoffed at how wise he sounded, how maturely he was dissecting my family when I wanted to be a brat and complain about how awful my evil stepmother and father were.
“I think I did, actually. But I came up with my own interpretation after almost dying a few times,” he said, and I nearly choked on my breath.
“Sorry, I—” I began.
He held up his hand. “Sorry for what? Why is it your first instinct to say ‘sorry’？ Did you send me to war? Did you hold my hand while I enlisted? Do you profit millions from sending me off?”
I was sort of stunned at the way he was speaking to me. It was like something inside of him had woken up and crawled out to play. There was a harshness laced with truth there, and honestly, I had never really thought about how a soldier felt after coming back from war. Especially a young one. I villainized my father for missing half of my life and I made sure to stay away from other soldiers, for the most part. Until now.
“Well, did you?” he repeated.
I shook my head. “I almost apologized again.”
“I know.” Kael turned his body so he was leaning toward the window, his face out of my eyesight while I drove.
As I skipped ahead in my playlist and Shawn Mendes started again, he reached to take his phone out of his pocket.
He didn’t do what most people our age did and mindlessly scroll, he checked the screen and put it in the cupholder. He didn’t seem bothered the least bit about the uncomfortable silence between us. His disaffection, mixed with the relief that dinner was over, allowed me to start to relax.
A few minutes went by and I found myself softly singing along to the music. I wasn’t great at singing and wasn’t trying to be. The song ended and I looked over at Kael, surprised to see that he was already looking at me. I didn’t feel the embarrassment that I was expecting. I smiled at him and kept on driving. An old Mariah Carey song that reminded me of my mom trying to hit the high notes came on and I swiped up on my phone and closed Spotify altogether.
We were on the highway now, only about five minutes away from my place. I didn’t want to ask him if he had anywhere else to go; it felt rude.
“You seemed to like my stepmom,” I half asked, half told him.
“How?”
I thought on it for a second. “I guess just that you were nice? I’m an asshole. I want you to dislike her or at least call her out for being snobby or obnoxiously fake. I think it bothers me that she’s the opposite of my mom. She’s not fun. My mom was really fun when I was younger. She was spontaneous and would never have made such a fuss around a dinner. And absolutely not on a weekly basis. Every fucking Tuesday? Like, who does that?”
Kael’s expression didn’t give me anything in return, but I still felt the urge to keep going.
“My mom used to listen to music every time she was in the living room or kitchen, and not on a fancy speaker that plays throughout the house.” I looked at him to make sure he was at least paying attention if he wasn’t going to speak. He was. I could feel it in the way he was watching me.
“She basically had a soundtrack to every moment of her life and would dance around the living room listening to Van Morrison, waving her arms around like a bird or a butterfly. She wore sparkly clothes and shoes, and colorful feathers, beads, and sometimes even sticks in her hair. She had soft eyes.”
“Is she alive?” Kael asked. I was so thankful not to be on the highway anymore. The town’s quiet streets were a much better place to handle such a blunt question about my mom.
“Yeah. I mean, technically.”
He raised both his brows. “Technically?”
I nodded, pulling to a stop at the red light. “She isn’t around, but she’s not dead. Not today.” I thought about it. “Not that I know of, at least.”
There it was. My oversharing, which made most people uneasy. I continued to do it even though a really shitty boyfriend I had in high school told me to stop telling people “uncomfortable” things about myself. He said it was weird, so did my brother, and a few therapists I managed to scare away. But it didn’t stop me. I drank in Kael’s face as he smiled a little, and I silently rejoiced that finally someone got my dark humor and didn’t get uncomfortable. Kael found me funny, I could tell. Maybe he was the only person in the world who didn’t think I was weird?